Finished reading: The Permanent Problem by Brink Lindsey 📚Food for thought though I am not entirely sure of the solutions proposed.
The ACM’s proposition to redefine the software engineering profession sounds a bit like the Systems Engineer Development (SED) program of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) that I hired in to in 1989. Unfortunately I don’t think such a long term vision is compatible with the U.S. short term culture, so I doubt many companies nor the industry will take this approach.
A Look To The Future With AI In It
Read a really good essay titled After AI Takes Everything written by a software engineer based in Singapore who goes by Airing. The link I am providing is to a copy of the essay I have in Readwise that includes my highlights. If you work in IT or know someone who does that is worried about what AI is doing to their future I recommend that you read the essay.
A part of the essay I find most relatable is the following:
The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy.
What will enable one to survive the AI revolution is their own sense of value as a human being. Consequently, I think what employees need to be sensitive to is the degree to which employers actually value them. If an employer treats their employees as a cog or as nothing more than a cost that employer will be eager to replace you no matter what. I would find another job. In fact, this is the primary reason why I decided to retire as what remains left of my life is too precious to be un-valued.
Oh, and by the way, I think this sense of value as a human beings is the core of Pope Leo’s encyclical.
I shared this on my linkblog, but it’s too good to not share here. 40 Ways the Tech Industry Could Stop Being Such a Colossal Goddamn Pain in the Ass
Bonus thought…now that Manton is working on integration between micro.blog and Wordpress, could he had an ability to cross post from a Wordpress blog to a micro.blog blog? Posting to my Timeline my own Wordpress linkblog items is useless, posting them to my blog would be useful.
Android 17
Google has released Android 17, and I just initiated the process to download and install it on my Pixel 10. 9to5Google has a video overview of all the changes, which are mostly cosmetic. For the last several years the Android version upgrades have not included significant functionality additions, rather they include UI and general performance improvements. Functional additions to Android come in the Quarterly Point Releases (QPR) and we expect QPR1 to Android 17 in the fall, timed with the release of the Pixel 11.
Also included in the Android 17 download is the June 2026 Pixel Drop that adds features to Pixel phones. Most useful to me is App Bubbles, which provide users the ability to add applications to the floating “bubble” that appears on top of all screens and apps running on the phone. We previously had this ability for text messaging conversations and I think of it as a multitasking feature that enables me to quickly switch to a task that I have pinned to the display.
One use that I have for app bubbles is for quick access to RadarScope while there are storms in my area to quickly see the current weather radar. To “pin” an app to the bubble tap and hold the app’s icon and tap Bubble at the bottom of the context menu. Note that this feature does not appear to work for all apps, particularly ones that have custom context menus. For example, tap and hold the Gmail icon and you do not see a Bubble option instead you see options to compose new email or open an Gmail account.
Wear OS 7 is also coming for the Pixel Watch and as I am less enthused about that release I am not go to force it to be installed on my watch.
Enough
I am of the opinion that one cannot begin to comprehend the risks of artificial intelligence without knowing oneself. We are embedded in a culture of “more” that teaches we should never be satisfied and we never see that “more” for what it is, an idol. The drive for the more, more wealth, more power and with that somehow a better life for oneself is the context in which decisions about artificial intelligence are being made.
More is the zeitgeist of the norm of civilization, so much so that most of us are willing to accept it as desirable and our true calling.
Using Google AI Plus
I replaced the standard, original, Google One subscription with Google AI Plus, which provides more AI features for $4.99 per month. I now have access to the Daily Brief produced by Gemini using Gmail, Calendar, and Text Messaging that I find useful but surprised I am not receiving notifications about them each day, instead I have to go in to the Gemini app to read them, which makes no sense. I found where I control whether I see notifications for Daily Brief and toggled that on/off.
Another problem I have with Gemini on the phone is that it is too verbose. When I ask it for information it produces several paragraphs and seems to insist on reading all of it when I prefer to read what was produced in silence. Perhaps Google could enable user to set a preference such as enabling users to tell Gemini to summarize long responses verbally and provide the remainder on screen to be read.
One more complaint… I like NotebookLM but I wish Google would do one of two things, either enable NotebookLM to access Google Keep or provide users the ability to create and edit notebook sources from a phone. Here is my use case. I religiously track the oil level in our 2013 GMC Terrain in a note in Google Keep. I found it useful to provide that odometer and oil level log to NotebookLM so that I can query it, but to get the log into a notebook I have to send a copy to Google Docs because NotebookLM only knows about Google Docs stored in Drive. Keep does not use Drive for storage, and I suspect Google stores notes in a backend database.
If Google will allow users to create notebooks in NotebookLM and create sources for them on a phone then that notebook could be an alternate to Keep. So far Google has not added any Gemini features to Keep, which is a bit surprising, but in another way suggests that maybe someday NotebookLM could replace Keep. I personally think it would be smart of Keep stayed as it and provided NotebookLM as the “AI equivalent” of Keep.
Ideally, NotebookLM would automatically sync/update Google Drive sources, but right now I have to manually sync to get updates which is fine except that if I simply send a Keep note to a Google Doc it doesn’t overwrite previously shared documents instead it creates another doc with the exact same name and the new “version” of the doc needs to be added as a source. In short, I don’t have an easy way to get updates to my oil log in to NotebookLM.
I use Readwise Reader to read web articles that I save while triaging my RSS subscriptions. Often what I blog about comes from what I read, and so I share the desire that Peter Rukavina wrote below:
My holy grail, as I said, was wanting to be able to highlight a passage in something and have a blog post here automagically created: quoting the work of other writers and posting a short comment is something I do a lot, and I wanted to streamline the process (see also The Three Virtues of a Great Programmer).
Peter goes on to describe how we built a process to post a highlighted quote and an associated note created in Readwise Reader to his blog, and I really want to do this for myself.
Right now I feel there is no point in ranting about the Chicago Cubs because with the same person at the top of the organization thinking there would be a different outcome is insane. Jed’s big off-season signing was an exchange for one under-performing player in the last third of his career for another, so the lineup is the same as last year and thus we had no real reason to expect something better than last season.